When the World Ended

[1]

It was the end of the world, and I was bored.

It shouldn’t be like this I thought. I mean, if you think about the end of the world, like you have only a day or two left before everything finishes, then you should really be doing loads of mad stuff. Like breaking into the fairground and going on the rides for free or stealing expensive stuff from the shops or going up to that girl in your class that you’ve always fancied and saying, “Hey, what about it? After all, we’ve not got long left, so if not with me now, then maybe you’ll never do it.”

But the fairground had shut years ago and none of the rides worked, there was nothing worth nicking from the shops and the girl I fancied had left on a train headed for Warsaw two weeks ago. So, there I was, kicking my heels in the overgrown streets whilst explosions rumbled in the distance and jets screamed past overhead.

What a shit end to the world! Not like in the films at all.

“Volodya, what are you doing here?”

I looked up. It was Brigi, a girl from one of the other classes in my year. I didn’t know much about her except that she had a weird name and was said to have a personality to match. They say that she once went into the men’s toilets and pissed standing up for a dare, but that is probably not true. Anyway, whatever the case, there she was standing over me as I sat on a bench in the Bohdan Khmelnytskyi Park pondering over the end of life as we knew it.

“Dunno, just chillin’.”

“Shouldn’t you be fighting? I mean, didn’t they put a call out for every able-bodied man to defend our beloved motherland?”

She said the phrase in an ironic voice, as if it wasn’t that beloved at all. Was she taking the piss out of me or them? I couldn’t be sure. I surveyed her chestnut hair cut in a rough bob and her blue eyes. “Able-bodied’s the key word,” I replied, trying to sound pissed off rather than relieved. My limp, plus my glasses. They said they wouldn’t accept me.”

Actually, that was bollocks. I never volunteered as you’re meant to and because of my limp which was caused by a car hitting me when I was eight, no one asked why. I’d never been glad of that accident until then; it was painful at the time, but it saved me from being called a coward or worse, getting blown up.”

“Why didn’t you get out of town then? When you could, like.”

My eyes drifted down to her thighs clad in tight blue denim. Not the girl I’d always fancied in class, but there could be worse people to spend the end of the world with. Maybe I would get to make of those three cliches a reality?

“Why? I’ve nowhere to go to and my dad is fighting at the front. He’ll worry if I’m not there when he gets back.”

“What about your mum?”

“She fucked off with a guy from Kyiv six years ago.”

Her face brightened. “Mine too, except that it was eight years, and the guy was from Odessa. Total piece of shit, but she deserved him.”

“So why are you still here?”

“Why would I want to miss the action?”

“If action is what you want, why didn’t you volunteer? I mean, you haven’t got a limp and they take girls too.”

“You can fuck right off! Do you think I’d fight for that piece of shit?”

“Our president do you mean? You forget, the world thinks he’s a hero now.”

“He’s an actor, that’s all. Good in front of the cameras which is why they chose him.”

“I think you’ll find that the people chose him; he was democratically elected.” I don’t know why I was defending the guy; after all, I’d never given a shit about politics, but what she was saying just seemed unpatriotic.

“Democratic? Fishy more like. Some bloke you’ve never even heard of, suddenly gets on TV in some shit comedy where he becomes president by accident, then, in an instance, this nobody has tonnes of cash from everywhere and launches a campaign out of the blue and wins a landslide. That’s not democracy, it’s dodgy!”

“At least it’s better than them.” I gestured towards the low rumble of explosions to the south. “He’s a dictator.”

“At least he’s honest about being a total shit unlike our guy who’s all smoke and mirrors. No, I wouldn’t fight for either of them.”

“You fight for the motherland, not the leader.”

“You might, I don’t. What the fuck has the motherland ever done for me? No, they can all fuck off!”

A jet swooshed by overhead. I looked up to see whose it was but couldn’t make it out.

“One of theirs,” she said, reading my mind. “I saw the markings.”

About a mile away, in the directions that it was flying, there was the boom of an exploding bomb to confirm her answer.

We sat in silence for a moment, looking at the broken concrete fountain. Then she said, “Fancy doing something?”

“Like what?”

“We’re about to be killed any moment. There must be something.”

“S’pose so.”

“Say, I know what!” She stood up and took my hand, yanking me off the bench. “Come back with me to mine!”

I looked at her and realised that if you could get beyond the batshit crazy stuff, she really was quite cute. Besides, I was going to die, so what did it matter?

It was the end of the world after all.

[2]

We jumped on the metrotram and rode up to Gutovskogo where she lived. I’d never got off there before. It was a concrete hulk surrounded by shitty high-rise blocks. Like anywhere else in Kryvyi Rih I suppose. I was amazed that the trams were still working mind. I mean, with all the bombs and explosions and approaching tanks, you’d have thought they’d have stopped, but no, they still screeched and clattered along as if everything were normal.

Outside the station was a bar. Actually, it was the Café Bar “Yaitsei”. Yaitsei. Eggs. Who on earth calls their bar “Eggs”. Brigi walked inside.

The woman behind the counter knew her. She called her by name and produced two beers. There was no asking what type nor how much. Just two beers, there and then. Brigi walked back out and sat on one of the plastic picnic tables with Coca-cola umbrellas. I sat next to her. “I thought we were going to yours,” I said.

“We are,” she said. “This is where I live.”

“In this bar?”

“No, not in the bar, silly. Over there, in Block Sonyachnyy 58.” She pointed to one of the rain-streaked crumbling tower blocks. In the distance there was a loud explosion, and the table shook.

“Fuck!” I said, feeling that the bombing deserved a reaction. “We’ll all be done for soon.”

“What makes you think that?”

She liked to disagree with you did Brigi, I was learning that much.

“’Cos the Russians will be here any minute.”

“And if they are?”

“Then we’re all fucked, obviously.”

“What makes you say that?”

“’Cos they’ll murder us all!”

“Why on earth would they do that?”

“Fuck knows, but that’s what they did in Mariupol.”

“How do you know?”

“The news.”

“Propaganda.”

“You can’t say that!”

“I can ’cos it’s true. Most of what they report is simply made up. Not that the Russians are any different. You watch RT and that’s bollocks too, just a different type of bollocks. Watch both sides and plump for the middle. That might just be true.”

“You’re very sceptical,” I told her.

“I’ll take that as a compliment,” she replied before draining her beer and looking at mine, hardly touched. “Another?”

“Yeah, why not,” I replied, trying to sound nonchalant. I couldn’t be seen to be a lightweight in front of a girl and, besides, if we got pissed, then maybe she’d be more likely to go to bed with me.”

She came back with two beers. I burped from trying to neck down the remainder of my first.

“Gross!” she said.

“Sorry.” Realising I needed to change the subject, I said, “Brigi, that’s an unusual name. Is it Polish or something?”

“Nah, it’s short for Brigada.”

“Brigada. What kind of name is that?”

“A communist one. Me dad is a big communist. Back in the old days he did well, got an education and good job and everything. Then it all collapsed. Hated capitalism. Thought by giving me a proletarian name it might bring the good times back.”

“Hasn’t worked, has it?”

“Not really.”

“Is he still about, your dad?”

“She turned away. No, he’s dead.”

“Shit, sorry. What happened?”

“That beloved president of ours put him in prison when he banned all the communist and socialist parties. He died last year. He fell down a set of stairs apparently.”

“Fuck! Sorry to hear that! It sort of explains why you are all pro-Putin though.”

She turned towards me, face full of venom. “I’m not pro-Putin, ok? Don’t ever fucking say that again! I just don’t fall for the bullshit that the alternative is any better! Putin is a shit, Zelensky is a shit! They are the fucking same, except that Zelensky knows how to talk to a TV camera better. War is shit, but then is peace much better?”

“People aren’t getting killed during peacetime.”

“By bombs and guns, no, but the poverty, the drugs, the pollution and all the rest are during a pretty good job anyway.”

“That’s true.”

We drank the rest of that round in silence, and I realised that I was really starting to like Brigi. She could think out of the box and tell the world to fuck off.

I admired that.

“So, tell me a bit about yourself,” I said as we started our third beer and my head was beginning to spin, the courage that alcohol gives loosening my tongue.

“Not a lot to say really. I live here and it is shit. We’ve no money so I can’t follow any of my dreams.”

“But what are those dreams?”

“The usual I s’pose. To travel the world and see crazy shit. Like there’s a church in Ethiopia carved out of a single piece of rock; I’d love to see that. Or Tiananmen Square in Beijing where you can fit a million people, or some hills in the Philippines that look like mounds of chocolate. That kind of stuff.”

“They’re pretty cool dreams and not the usual at all. Most people just want to get rich and drive a Mercedes or a BMW and wear expensive clothes.”

“Most people are brainless idiots who just like what they are told to like.”

“Well, you’re pretty smart, I mean, I never heard of any of those things. But you don’t do that well in school, I mean, you’re not one of the ones that wins awards all the time and that.”

“’Cos I don’t play the fucking game, that’s way. School is bullshit anyway. It’s a system designed during the Industrial Revolution to turn everyone into good little factory workers who never ask questions and know enough to operate the machines but not too much, so they realise that they are being pissed on by those in charge.”

She started humming a tune and then sang:

“We don’t need no education!

We don’t need no thought control!

No dark sarcasm in the classroom!

Teachers leave them kids alone!”

What’s that?”

“Don’t tell me you don’t know Pink Floyd?!”

“No, never heard of them. Are they new?”

“Jesus! No, they’re old school, like really old school. British or American or something, that’s why they sing in English. ‘Another Brick in the Wall’, all about how they are trying to brainwash us, just like they managed to brainwash you that our beloved president is any better than the arsehole who’s trying to get rid of him.

“Hey! Teachers! Leave them kids alone!

All in all, it’s just another brick in the wall.

All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.”

She got the lady behind the bar to put the track on and we listened. It was cool, or at least, the bits that I could understand were. I wished then I’d tried harder in English.

“So, what about you, Volodya? Tell me about your life?”

“The same shit as yours really. We live in an apartment in Karachuny District. No money, nothing to do, want to get out of here.”

“I didn’t mean your reality; I meant your dreams.”

“My dreams? Well, I’d never thought about going to a church made out of rock or even Tiananmen Square. To be honest, travel has never excited me like that, leastways, not the travel you’re on about. My thing, ever since I was a little kid, has been space. I used to love those old books and stamps from the Soviet era with pictures of rockets, Yuri Gagarin, sputniks and all that. My dream would be to travel through the galaxy, see black holes and comets, meet aliens and weird creatures. Bullshit I know, I probably watched too much Star Wars.”

“Nah, I think it’s cool. I liked space stuff when I was a kid too. When I was little, I always thought that this metrotram station looked like something from outer space. I imagined that it was a spaceport, and the trams were transportation around the galaxy.”

I looked at the station, one of those crazy Soviet designs, made out of concrete, bulbous and futuristic once a vision of a brave new world but now merely a vandalised reminder that dreams don’t always come true. Still, it was pretty cool. “I get that,” I told her. “The next departure is to Uranus calling a Mars and Jupiter only. Passengers for Saturn and Neptune must change at Jupiter.”

“Ha! Yeah, that’s it! Another beer?”

How many beers we had I cannot say, but by this time I was getting quite drunk and so too was Brigi. When she disappeared to the toilet or to buy a drink, I wondered how I’d never noticed her before. She was really cool to hang out with. I wondered how many other cool people there were that I’d never got to know? An explosion rattled the windows of the bar and a chunk of concrete fell off the tower block nearest to us. I never would get to know them now, either. I gazed at the tower block, counting the storeys, and wondering how many missiles it would take before it crumpled to the ground.

“Penny for your thoughts?” she said, returning.

“Just looking at the apartment blocks and thinking,” I replied.

“Journey through a Ukrainian forest

Rising high on either side

A billion anonymous leaves of glass

An endless canopy of concrete.”

“What’s that?”

“A poem I composed.”

“Jesus, Brigi, you are some seriously cool chick!”

“And you, dear Volodya, are drunk.”

Several beers after that we went back to her place. I can hardly remember the walk except that I kept falling over and she had to support me. In her drab little apartment with beige floral wallpaper and the same furniture as everyone else’s, we lay together in the bed that had once belonged to her parents. She hugged me and cried about what was happening to our world and I cried too, but that was all.

[3]

The morning sun woke me, streaming through the window whose curtains we had forgotten to draw in our drunkenness. I turned over to see Brigi still asleep by my side. Although my head ached, I was happy. I put my arms around her and revelled in the fact that we were still alive despite the distant thuds beyond the walls of the apartment.

She stirred and turned towards me. She kissed me softly on the lips and I returned the gesture. It was real, it meant something. We had survived the night; the end had not yet come. And we were together.

Surely that must mean something.

The gas did not work, nor the electric, so she could not make breakfast for us as she’d suggested. We decided to go outside to see if somewhere was serving something. A cake or chocolate bar perhaps, a coffee would be ideal. The lift didn’t work so we descended down the five flights of stairs. There were few people about, but we met an old man on the third flight who greeted Brigi. Later she told me that he was a neighbour.

When we got to the metro station, we had a shock. “Yaitse”, the bar where we had got to know one another and got so drunk was no longer there. Instead, a smoking pile of rubble took its place. For some reason this affected us both deeply, in a way that other things had not. We sat down on a wall and cried, hugging one another because we knew that the other understood. Destruction, even when it is close by, is still an abstract thing, but this was something concrete. That place had made us happy only hours before, it had impacted upon our lives, and now it never would again. I wanted it all to end, to stop and told this to Brigi. She nodded slowly and then stood up. She walked into the rubble and came back bearing two packages. They were 7DAYS croissants with a chocolate filling. She handed one to me with the word, “Breakfast?” I nodded and tore it open. Amazingly, the fragile little roll had survived all the destruction around it and tasted just as 7DAYS croissants always do. “Take this with it,” said Brigi, “it’ll help it all go away.” I slipped the tab on my tongue and let it dissolve. Then we sat on the wall and gazed at the place where memories had been made.

Around five minutes later, things started to happen. The metrotram station, which I’d thought looked at little bit like a spaceship the previous day, I now realised was a spaceship, about to take off for another galaxy. And the people were all boarding, eager to get on the last flight out of this hellhole. There were astronauts in their spacesuits, aliens with long green bodies and hairy creatures that looked like Chewbacca off Star Wars. I told Brigi that we had better leave too, and she smiled at me and nodded, and reminded me to put on my spacesuit. I did as she bid and then helped her to fasten hers. We kissed before putting the helmets on and then walked into the waiting spaceship.

Except that it wasn’t a spaceship, how silly of me to have thought that earlier. No, it was only a spaceport, from which rockets left for the moon, Mars, and other galaxies. But the spaceship was coming. We watched it glide in, as smooth as silk ready for its interplanetary voyage. We jumped onboard and took up seats by the window so we could see all the fun. It was so exciting. It started with a lurch as it gathered up speed and then the driver switched into hyperdrive and then we were off. Past our window the endless galaxy could be viewed, shooting stars and the Moon, then Mars, a few bumps as we passed through the asteroid belt, then the great gas giants of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. Then we exited the solar system, but there was still plenty to see, with explosions as comets collided and asteroids slammed into planets. We waved at passing alien spacecraft and a planet get swallowed up by its expanding sun.

We stopped at an unknown spaceport and disgorged some of the aliens and spacemen. Did we wish to alight? Not at all! This was the ride of our lives and we wanted to continue until the end of the line, so off we went again, passing red giants and yellow dwarves. But then, up ahead, I saw it. “That black hole is too near!” I shouted to Brigi. “Stop! Stop! Turn around!” she cried, but the pilot couldn’t hear and so we were sucked closer and closer in before entering the vortex itself, complete darkness enveloping everything, the shock to our bodies being so great that we passed out in each other’s arms.

[4]

I woke up. Brigi was beside me, her head on my chest. The tram had stopped. I looked out of the window. Overgrown platforms and smashed panes of glass. We were at a station but one that looked as if it hadn’t been used for years. I waited for us to move on again, but nothing happened. No one got on and no one got off yet still we stayed put.

Brigi stirred, opened her eyes and yawned. “Where are we?” she asked sleepily.

“Fucked if I know. A station, but it looks deserted.”

She peered out of the grimy window. “It’s Vovnopriadylna,” she said.

“Vovnopriadylna?”

“Yeah, they built it to serve loads of apartment blocks they were also going to build all around, but then the Soviet Union collapsed, and the money ran out, so the station stood there in the middle of nowhere.”

“How do you know this stuff?”

“I’ve been riding these trams for years. They’re free, ain’t they, and I’ve got no money, so I often just sit on them and go the full distance. It’s the only travelling I can afford.”

We got off onto the deserted platforms. Broken glass and weeds were everywhere. The few other passengers had all disappeared. We were on the track heading back into the city. “We must’ve gone right to the end and then run round to make the return journey,” she said.

“Why didn’t he continue then?” I asked.

We went to the cab and got our answer. The driver had a bullet through his head and his mouth lolled open. Flies buzzed about him. Up ahead something had hit the electric wires and they drooped to the ground. “He was probably shot, and the tram continued on for a while until the power cut out,” I said.

Brigi nodded. “So, this truly is the final stop,” she said before taking my hand and adding, “come on, let’s go!”

Beyond the station was a wasteland, a flat plain full of weeds and low-lying shrubs. Once the communist planners had envisaged a high-rise model city. Now there was only the buzz of insects and explosions beyond the horizon.

Up ahead of the station, beyond the wasteland, were some trees and, protruding above the treeline, an office block. “Let’s take a look,” suggested Brigi. I agreed and we walked hand-in-hand across the no-man’s land. Up closer, it turned out to be part of a huge factory complex, now all rusting and empty, weeds growing in the cracks between the paving, a burnt-out Lada by the entrance. “Perhaps the people who were going to live in the apartments would have worked here?” I said. She nodded. “I wonder what they made?”

Up close, we noticed one of those Soviet-era sculptures on the side of the building. It showed a two girls in skirts with hair cut like Brigi’s either playing musical instruments or holding bars of steel (it was so stylised that you couldn’t really tell which). “They’re like us!” she said. “Two young explorers climbing through space and time. Let’s go in!”

And so, we did.

Inside was the land that time forgot, as if we were the only two survivors from another age. We walked through the open doors, across the tiled reception area and then up one flight of stairs. Rotting paper was strewn across the floor of the office, and broken equipment littered the desks. We climbed up another flight to the same scene and then up one more to the same again. In the end, we didn’t bother checking, instead just climbed and climbed until our hearts pounded as our breath was pumped around our bodies. At the top was an iron door that was unlocked. We opened it and found ourselves on the roof.

Hand-in-hand we walked out into the sunlight. As if we had been expected, two chairs were up there, overlooking the vista of the doomed city to the south. We walked towards them and, as we did planes started flying over, one after the other. There was noise below us too, a low rumbling and, when we reached the precipice, we saw a long line of tanks bearing the Z of the invader and their three-striped flag moving slowly along the road we had just crossed. We sat on the chairs to watch the show, our hands still clasped. As the planes got to the city in the distance, we saw the projectiles drop from them, tiny nuggets of death and demise. I turned to Brigi and said, “I’m glad to have spent the end of the world with you,” I whispered.

“Me too,” she whispered back, and her lips touched mine.

As we kissed a new sun rose over what once was the city of Kryvyi Rih, obliterating our world forever with a great orange fireball.

“That is the end of our world,” said Brigi “Now let’s make a new one.”

Written 25/03/22, Smallthorne, UK

Copyright © 2022, Matthew E. Pointon